4 Powerful Ways to Use an Online Advent Calendar

The Advent calendar is one of the most popular Christmas traditions. The tradition can be traced back to the 19th Century, where families coloured a chalk line for every day in December on their doors, until Christmas day, or hung up little pictures on the wall, one for each day in December.

Times have changed, and the calendar is now a part of the digital world and the opportunities it brings for promoting your product should not be missed. There are four main benefits of investing in a digital Advent Calendar; to generate new leads, promote your product and grow your sales, to capture key marketing insights and boost engagement on social media.

It is an excellent way to create excitement amongst your customers. Using the countdown to Christmas, you generate an ever-growing anticipation amongst your community. It’s your chance to make the most of the holiday spirit and create a buzz amongst your clients.

It is not only a great way to promote your company image and product, but also to engage with your customers. If you play your cards right, your clients will come back everyday until Christmas to see what’s behind each calendar door. That means you will get your customer’s undivided focus for 24 days.

Boost engagement on social media

With an Advent Calendar, you can create excitement among your community as your customers will look forward to seeing what goods or discounts they will receive each day. It also means you will have content for the next 24 days planned in one session.

You can even double the use of your content by announcing the winner(s) everyday (if you have winners) on social media and tag them to increase your reach. This gives your company profile a more personal approach and contributes to more engagement and traffic to your website when your customers flock there to check out the surprise each day.

Fabienne Vossen, Digital Media Associate at Mainland Europe, launched a successful campaign for Benefit San Fransico, which increased their engagement.

“We launched our branded advent calendar in 11 countries across Europe, with fun interactive activations each day. Our followers enjoyed it, and we got over half a million hits and over 75K participants. All in all, it was a very successful campaign for us!”

See how Benefit used their campaign to increase social media engagement.

Pro Tip: remember to post the prizes every day on social media

Generate more leads and grow your email list

See how Flexfunding used an Advent Calendar

If your goal is to get more subscribers, an Advent Calendar is your fast track to generate new leads and get more signups to your email list. How, you ask? To participate in the countdown, you ask your clients to sign up with their e-mail address, and there you go, you have a new lead. Clients will be keen to sign up in order to satisfy their curiosity and find out what prizes that await them. The CEO at Flexfunding used an Advent Calendar with impressive results:

“In a matter of 24 days, we doubled our email list and attracted loads of new potential customers to our brand.”

Pro Tip: Don’t ask people for too much information on the signup form and make the prize worth it for your customers

Promote your products and boost sales

You can use these 24 days of attention to inform your clients about the quality and benefits of your product(s). You can tailor the questions to inform and to improve your brand awareness.

See how Nordics & Baltics used an Advent Calendar

You also have the chance to improve your company’s image by asking questions about your environmental-friendly policy, sustainability policy, charity work or any positive change your company promotes. These are very precious minutes which you get with your customer; use them right, and you build a good customer relationship.

Besides generating more leads and getting more subscribers, the Advent Calendar can also help boost sales. For prizes, you can give a discount on your products and then your customers will be inclined to use it to purchase your product.

“It helps us attract loads of new followers and over 80% of visitors return every single day to participate and engage with our brand. We used each of the 24 days strategically to educate our audience about our products and to ask relevant questions that help us understand them better.”

Pro Tip: Use your product as the prize and ask people questions about your product so they go to your website and learn about it

Capture key marketing insights

See how Landbrug & Fødevarer used their Advent Calendar

The Advent Calendar collects useful in-depth data. It gathers information about your clients’ personal needs, habits, preferences and purchase intention. If you are burning to know something about your clients, you can ask those questions and use the Advent Calendar as a marketing research tool.

As a digital marketer, you know that data is everything and these key marketing insights can be used to generate new leads and improve inbound sales.

Anina Kjær, Senior Consultant at Landbrug & Fødevarer, used the Advent calendar to gain helpful information for her company.
“We used each of the 24 daily locks to ask the right questions to our visitors and uncovered many valuable findings that are otherwise hard to capture. Advent calendars not only a great way to reach more people, but also an excellent tool to gather market insights.”

Pro tip: Be strategic about the questions you ask: ask about what you want to know and keep the questions easy to answer.

Ready to put on your finest?

An online Advent Calendar is a powerful tool to boost engagement on social media, grow your email list, generate new leads, promote your products and boost sales. Best of all, it is a fun experience for your clients, and you gain more information than from regular promotions. The best part is, it is less work for you.

I hope you have become inspired to try an Online Calendar for your Christmas marketing. If you want to make your own calendar, you can use our platform, Dot, to make it. All you need is to create questions about your company and leave the coding up to us, so you can focus on making great content.

You can launch your own branded Advent Calendar that includes your visual identity and content. It will help you capture leads and upload them directly from our platform to your email list, automation or CRM system. Get started here!